I got to catch up with some friends this week while I was in Toronto for a mobile panel, and we started talking about the topic of personal branding. One of my friends is a real estate agent, and the other is an aspiring actor (well, not so aspiring -- he spent all day on set today shooting a US-based TV show. Turns out a lot of American shows are shot in Toronto). Both of them want to create a strong personal brand in their respective fields.

Having started a real estate brokerage in the past, I have some great tips on how to create a successful real estate brand, and I believe in the power of personal branding. So instead of sending a private email with my tips to my friends, I figured I'd write a blog about it in the hopes others can join the conversation about what's worked for them.

Daniel's Top 10 Tips to Turn You Into the Coca-Cola of Personal Brands:

1) Conquer your fear. Fear is what stops many people from starting to build a personal brand. If you're a service provider, it's likely a fear that by giving away your expertise, you won't have anyone willing to pay you. That couldn't be farther than the truth. Read my blog on how sharing your knowledge freely makes you a superstar. None of the ideas below will do you any good if you're afraid to execute on them. Be prepared to be embarrassed. Get over it, and move on. Your brand is counting on you.

2) Capture content. I can't stress this enough as the most important part of building a personal brand (once you're over your fear of execution). Capturing the expertise that's inside your head is a primary building block in successful personal branding. Your genius insights and thoughts aren't going to help anyone if they're just spoken to one person. There's no scribe following you around breathlessly writing down every word you say. You alone are responsible for acting as a force multiplier: If you think it, say it or write it, then do it in a way that as many people can participate as possible. Following are a few very pragmatic ways to accomplish this, but everything starts with a commitment to capture content.

3) Answer questions in a blog. When you get a written question from someone (for example, a real estate client over email), don't write them back over email. Instead, write the answer in a blog post. Instead of spending 15 minutes writing the same answer over and over again via email, spend 3 hours composing the answer once in a blog post, and then send that link back to the person over email. You accomplish many objectives this way. The most important result is that the person asking you the question gets a much better answer, because you've put 3 hours of thought into it instead of 15 minutes. This is why I often say Henry Ford would've loved blogs, because you're creating an assembly line of knowledge. You also create a public knowledge base that others can build on, and you benefit from what I call the "Angelina Jolie Effect."

) Capture video at events and panels. How many events do you go to (conferences, trade events, speeches -- anything) where great content is shared? Next time you attend an event like this, look around the room. Is anyone capturing the content? Probably not -- as I've said before there are often cultural barriers to capturing content (if you don't know what I mean, try setting up a camera and see what types of strange looks you get). But therein lies the opportunity: Since nobody else is capturing the content for repurposing later, it's getting lost -- imagine if you can capture all the great content from an event and be the one to share it with the world. You'll build a great brand because you'll be offering content nobody else has. That's why I capture video at every panel I speak on. In fact, I wouldn't even travel to do a panel if I couldn't capture it. Sure it might be nice to share a discussion with 500 people in a room in one day, but by capturing it tens of thousands of people can see it over the course of years. The rig I use to capture content is this Kodak zi8 camera. The entire setup costs less than $500.

4) Use SocialCam liberally.SocialCam is a fantastic app for capturing video content. For example, when I was hacking a vegas cab line, I took a video of the experience using SocialCam. SocialCam then automatically uploaded the video to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and I later embedded the YouTube video in a blog I wrote about the experience. But you don't even need to embed the video in your blog -- just taking lots of videos using SocialCam on your phone is a great start; it'll give you content that you can repurpose later. And if you're a Realtor, for example, you can have a client log into their Facebook account on SocialCam, do a video with them about any real estate related topic (maybe a testimonial, for example) and then have your client post the video post to their wall and Twitter stream. It's a great way for you to get exposure to their friends and followers using them as a 'hook' to vouch for you. SocialCam is one of my favorite brand-building tools today. Use it liberally and often -- when you're in the car going to see a client, for example, take a SocialCam video of what you're up to. Just get that expertise out of your head and into a digital format that can be shared with the world! If you're super hardcore about capturing content you can do what my friend Frank LLosa of FranklyRealty did and create something like the "Wheel Estate Cam" (better ask him for permission first).

5) Do screencasts showcasing your expertise. Back when I was in real estate, I did lots of low-budget, cheesy videos that showcased our company's expertise in the real estate market, like this one and this one. These screencasts and videos are so low budget as to be laughable, but that's actually what makes them so awesome. The rawness of the video (I refuse to edit whenever possible) makes it feel real and not like a marketing slick. And I got an amazing amount of business from these videos. The video at right has been watched almost 15,000 times. I literally had home buyers from all over the country contacting me asking me to represent them. Stop for a minute to think about that: There are ~50,000 licensed Realtors in most states, and yet buyers were so desperate for real information that they were reaching out to me -- someone who wasn't even licensed in the majority of the states where these requests came from. Again, this is about getting the expertise out of your head and into a format where others can benefit from it. This goes for my actor friend as well -- showcase your skills by capturing your acting prowess whenever and wherever you can. One thing I hear time and again from people is that nobody would want to hear what they have to say. That's just total BS. In many cases you've spent years learning information that makes you a professional. Just because it's mundane to you doesn't mean it's not interesting to someone who's learning about it for the first time. Case in point -- none of what I'm writing is new to me, but I'm spending the time to get the expertise out of my head and into yours. And the fact that you're still reading about it tells me it's interesting to you! So pay it forward to others by doing the same. Get that knowledge out of your head.

6) Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) at something. You pick what that something is. Maybe you're the world's leading expert on how paint dries. Whatever it is, make it your own and make yourself known for it. A great example is my friend Joey the Cat. He's the world's leading expert on skeeball machines. He dresses up as a cat and plays, rents, sells (and probably dreams) skeeball machines. But you know what? He's been featured on NPR, the NY Times, and a ton of other outlets for this expertise. When anyone thinks (or google searches) for skeeball rentals, Joey comes up on the first page of Google. He's thrown himself into being the world's leading expert on skeeball. What's your SME claim to fame?

) Focus. If everything is important, then nothing is important. You want to pick a very defined, focused area to begin building your personal brand in. Don't succumb to ABBA. The more focused your SME area, the faster you'll see results. Corollary to this point: Don't give up if ou don't see results right away. It may take you 6 to 12 months and hundreds of videos, blog posts and tweets to become recognized by Google and your target audience.

8) A/B Test and optimize. Once you figure out what's working, start optimizing it. Here's a great post on using Optimizely for A/B testing.

9) Use Twitter to run contests. My friend mentioned that he got his own trailer on set for the TV show he was acting in. I suggested he consider doing a super simple Twitter campaign the next time he was on set: Send a Tweet out a day or two before the shoot stating that the person who re-tweets his tweet the most gets to go with him to the shoot, and hang out in his trailer for the day (or for an hour, whatever). In this way, he'd be using something he has proprietary access to -- a TV/movie set -- as a hook for a simple Twitter contest campaign. Almost all of us have some type of access to something that our friends & followers don't. Twitter is a great way to engage an audience and make them more passionate about your personal brand. For example, whenever I'm on a panel I give out my twitter ID and encourage people to tweet their questions during the panel. I weave answers to their questions into my panel responses. It's a great way to make the audience feel like they're a part of the conversation, and it keeps the panel more relevant to their interests, and therefore more engaging.

10) Get great press. Getting great press can be incredibly easy if you know how. When people read content in the news, they have a bias to believe it's true. Getting press is many times more valuable than advertising, so leverage my techniques to show off your SME to the world.

Hey, just read this post after being led here from your promoted post on Sebastian Marshall's blog - great stuff. However, none of the links in this post seem to be functional as of this writing. Any idea if that's an easy fix?

Lots of great ideas here but #3 really turned on that lightbulb in my head. I get asked questions each week on subjects ranging from teaching English to polyphasic sleep to minimalism and I now realize that I should be answering them on my blog instead of in a quick 15 minute response. However, I think there's another payoff you didn't mention here. By answering questions in a blog 1) your readers who interact with you feel important and that they've contributed something to your work and 2) the readers who haven't reached out to you in the past will realize that you take questions seriously and will be more inclined to contact you in the future.

Just three hours ago a friend asked me a great question and I responded in a sloppy 5 minute email. I would LOVE to give him another proper response and link back here as the first post after switching my blog to SETT! #GiveMeSETT

I have to admit, i think there is a lot of failure in number 6 and 7. We've got a world full of possibility out there and sometimes it's too easy to take on to much. Instead of picking a small arena, focusing and becoming an SME, we push further and try to do a little bit of everything leading to failure. I see this particularly in balancing work and personal. I have the things I excel at and want to have a work brand around, within work, but they aren't necessarily the same things I want to excel at in my personal. For example, I'm an IT Project Manager, I want to be known as a great Agile PM, a problem solver with PM processes and responsive to teams and stakeholders. In my personal life, I'm more interested in being a writer and foodie. Sure I use my PM skills to define and complete projects, but being a food writer/blogger requires completely different skill set to develop then Agile Project Management. It's balancing act. #GiveMeSETT

Thank you for that informative piece, i am inspired.I have a website where i blog, but i've gone off the track and i'm not satisfied with the layout of it. Also, its not the website idea that i originally had that is being utilised. Fair enough i can always build a new website.......I want to reach out to women who were in abusive relationship, and those who continue to stay in those types of negative relationships that you can go it alone and with kids in tow and make a success of your life. I also love talking about the things that build strong, long lasting and fulfilling relationships, but it seems as if everyone wants to build a relationship website or blog....Now i'm wondering how can i make mine a little different from the rest? I am still figuring out your information is applicable to what i want to continue doing???

Yes, sorry about that. Part of the roller coaster of being on the bleeding edge of blogging platforms! @SETT didn't import the original post quite right. @Tynan is aware of it and working on a fix. I'll update this post as soon as that's live.

Absolutely man! Can't wait to see your SocialCam videos. The real estate business is so old school, even just a tiny bit of real SME knowledge sharing goes a LONG way. And you have an incredibly deep expertise in the industry to share. Excited to see how it shakes out.

As usual D, an evening with you is an awe-inspiring experience. Thanks for pointing out these great tips and I will be using social cam tonight to start creating content! looking forward to seeing how this will turn out!

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If you know me, you know that I believe strongly in capturing content. I believe that within 20 years, humanity will be capturing most, if not all, of its content. To me, it's a shame that we produce content which then gets lost, only to be stored inside the heads of the people who where physically present. If we're ever to make a leap in learning past what each individual can experience, we need to have a collective framework where people can learn quickly by sharing in experiences others have had. In short, I believe it should be a basic human right to capture the content you've experienced, and share it with whomever you want.

To many people, that can be a very scary idea. What if someone is having a private conversation with you, and you capture and share it with the world? And although these are very real issues, to me, they are issues that can be solved. The benefit so far exceeds the cost of figuring these issues out that it's a no-brainer (see our experiences with Stargate as an example). In fact, there are opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to find ways of easing the world into the idea of capturing and sharing content in ways that people are culturally comfortable with and that maintain people's sense of privacy.

Today I had a typical experience that highlights how far we have to go before the capturing of content is accepted. I was attending GigaOm's session on AppTV, and setting my Kodak Zi8 camera up, as I often do, to capture the session. That's when Surj Patel of GigaOm came up and told me I couldn't record the session. When I asked him why, he told me to "fuck off". Pretty distressing attitude.

Today I attended the GigaOm Bunker Session titled "Is App TV Coming Next?"
If you know me, you know that I believe strongly in capturing content. I believe that within 20 years, humanity will be capturing most, if not all, of its content. To me, it's a shame that we produce content which then gets lost, only to be stored inside the heads of the people who where physically present. If we're ever to make a leap in learning past what each individual can experience, we need to have a collective framework where people can learn quickly by sharing in experiences others have had. In short, I believe it should be a basic human right to capture the content you've experienced, and share it with whomever you want.
To many people, that can be a very scary idea. What if someone is having a private conversation with you, and you capture and share it with the world? And although these are very real issues, to me, they are issues that can be solved. The benefit so far exceeds the cost of figuring these issues out that it's a no-brainer (see our experiences with Stargate as an example). In fact, there are opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to find ways of easing the world into the idea of capturing and sharing content in ways that people are culturally comfortable with and that maintain people's sense of privacy.
Today I had a typical experience that highlights how far we have to go before the capturing of content is accepted. I was attending GigaOm's session on AppTV, and setting my Kodak Zi8 camera up, as I often do, to capture the session. That's when Surj Patel of GigaOm came up and told me I couldn't record the session. When I asked him why, he told me to "fuck off". Pretty distressing attitude.
In fairness, he did come up to me to apologize later, but his attitude highlights how far we have to go before capturing content is culturally OK. I do understand that it's GigaOm's business model to put content behind a pay wall, and that's fine. I would argue that allowing audience members to capture some content would increase the subscriber base. It exposes more people to the brand, and a professional, edited recording will always be better and more engaging than a blogger with his flip-style camera.
I was disappointed by Surj's myopic view of the value of capturing content, and his aggressive response when I asked him why that was his policy. And I post this blog not to embarrass him, but because I believe in the importance of allowing people to capturing content. I'm sure some of you will disagree with me, and I welcome your comments below.
As an aside, I've had similar things happen before, where groups were surprised I wanted to capture content (never so aggressively, though), and those groups have literally thanked me later and said "you were right, it provided a lot of value to us that you captured the content" after they saw the increase in interest in their brand from the video.
Here's the video of Surj telling me to 'fuck off':

A few years ago, I directed, acted in and produced an original work here in Brooklyn based on Seneca’s Medea. The first thing I did was post a casting call, then I hosted auditions, then rehearsed and performed the piece. Along the way, I also designed a simple, clean website, wrote copy to put into emails inviting others to come, setup a Facebook event page, formed local partnerships to help get the word out, designed the programs, coordinated a photo shoot (and then designed images to email people), created a logo and postcard.

Allow me then to rephrase my original comment then: I directed, acted in, produced and marketed my piece. I had no spare money to hire someone to do this for me, and - as I will discuss later - thank goodness I didn’t as “hiring” and “marketing” are no longer an ideal strategy. I had suddenly become lead designer, writer and communicator for the piece I had made. The internet now dominates our collective landscape of communication, and understanding the nuances of web marketing is essential for the contemporary creator of performance. The aim is to get the word out, exciting people about you and your work so much that they want to come see it in person.

The changing marketing landscape has dramatically altered institutional outreach programs as well. In fact, I propose that it is much harder to market from an institutional standpoint online than as an individual artist. Why? Well, it’s really very simple: what is valuable online is relationship, vulnerability and engaging content all conveyed through a voice that sounds familiar (ie - consistent and human). These factors allow for a connection to form. Finding this is vastly more difficult to do as an institution which likely explains why most are so, so, so very bad at it.

In this article, I would like to discuss what is working online and what isn’t. In particular, I would like to highlight the crucial areas where artists need to focus in order to attract more attention to their work. Oh, and while I am at it, allow me to dispel the “if you build it they will come” notion. It is no longer enough just to create great art. You must also know how to represent it online, and how to build media which is clear and - hopefully - sharable. The former approach worked in the 1960’s, but nowadays, people learn and explore newness via the web rather than venturing out into the unknown. In other words, I will look at your website and video content before I make the decision to buy a ticket.

The exciting thing for new, emerging artists and institutions is that the playing field has been leveled. You no longer need a massive marketing budget to reach people, you simply need a great idea. A young choreographer can create a 90 second video, share it with friends and suddenly have a great interest in his/her work. A producer can capture a particularly suggestive moment of a new piece using Vine, share it via Twitter, and have that seen by hundreds or even thousands of potential fans. Audience members can also now photograph or video portions of your work, share it online, becoming marketers themselves. One of the exciting ways that public performance and mobile technology merge is in how strangers can suddenly now become marketers.